Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000

by Stephen Kotkin (Oxford; $25)

In 1995, Kotkin, a professor of history at Princeton, published Magnetic Mountain, a groundbreaking study of Stalinist socialism as it developed in the gargantuan steel town of Magnitogorsk, in central Russia. In his portrayal of that perverse utopia, the author displayed the skills of a dogged reporter and a meticulous archivist. The same strengths are evident in this brief, lucid study, which draws upon dozens of obscure Kremlin memoirs, provincial records, and interviews with top-level officials and oligarchs to provide us with the clearest picture we have to date of the post-Soviet landscape. Kotkin effectively describes how what was called reform was actually a continuing freefall collapse; he also expertly depicts the lingering networks and habits of the Soviet era, and how they have formed a post-imperial world in all its corrupt splendor.♦

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